Hezbollah (55 page)

Salman Harb must have marveled at his good fortune for having stumbled onto a potentially huge source—someone who went to the same gym as a longtime Hezbollah target. The information provided by this twenty-three-year-old participant in an outreach seminar represented an ideal operational opportunity, so Sultani and Harb kept in touch by phone, email, and Facebook after their meeting in Morocco. As it happened, Israeli intelligence operations eventually tagged Rawi Sultani as an Israeli citizen who was in communication with Hezbollah.
¹⁹³
Informed of this discovery, the Shin Bet and the International Serious Crimes Unit of the Israeli police tracked Sultani’s email and Facebook correspondence with Hezbollah, unraveling the plot to target Ashkenazi before it became operational.
¹⁹⁴

Authorities waited to arrest Sultani, however, until they were sure they had collected sufficient evidence to convict him.
¹⁹⁵
In December 2008, Sultani flew to Poland to meet with a Hezbollah operative going by the name Sami. Sultani officially joined Hezbollah at this meeting and passed along information he had gathered about Ashkenazi and other Israeli officials and IDF bases.
¹⁹⁶
Sultani was provided encryption software for his computer and a secure email address at which he could contact his handlers. (The same had been done for Kashkoush.) Once he returned to Israel, Sultani kept in touch with both Sami and Salman Harb. Later, a former senior Shin Bet official would assess that Iran was most likely kept informed of Hezbollah’s efforts to collect intelligence on Ashkenazi.
¹⁹⁷
Sultani’s arrest came in late August 2009, and ultimately he was sentenced to five years and
eight months for spying on the chief of staff and maintaining contact with a foreign agent.
¹⁹⁸

In more recent years, evidence has emerged indicating that a core group of Hezbollah operatives working with Qais Obeid—people like Mohamad Hashem, Ayman Shihadeh, and Salman Harb—have the responsibility of meeting Israeli Arab recruits abroad. Another such operative is Hassan Jaja, who recruited Israeli Arab political activist Ameer Makhoul, among others. Makhoul, who is from Haifa, headed the Union of Arab Community-Based Associations, which works to strengthen and expand the voluntary work of Arabs. Makhoul is an author and the brother of a former Knesset member, and his arrest sparked protests among Israeli Arabs. In custody, however, Makhoul reportedly admitted to meeting Hassan Jaja in Jordan in 2004, finding out Jaja was a Hezbollah operative soon after the July 2006 war, and agreeing to serve as a Hezbollah source two years later. In 2008, Makhoul reached out to Jaja and offered his services, which led to a meeting in Copenhagen, at which one of Jaja’s men installed an encoding program on Makhoul’s laptop and provided Makhoul cash to cover the cost of the trip to Denmark. Sitting at a Copenhagen café, the Hezbollah operative asked Makhoul to collect information about Israeli army bases, Shin Bet and Mossad offices, the home address of the head of the Shin Bet, security surrounding the prime minister’s and defense minister’s convoys, and information on the impact of terror attacks in Israel. Makhoul was also asked for information about Israeli Arabs and Israelis of Russian descent experiencing financial stress who might be open to a recruitment pitch by Hezbollah.
¹⁹⁹

Back in Israel, Makhoul reportedly sent Jaja at least ten encoded emails providing details on the precise location of two Shin Bet installations, including means of entry and security procedures; the location of a Mossad facility; information about the IDF’s Nachshonim base (which Makhoul inexplicably thought was an American base); and the location of the Rafael Advanced Defense Systems factory off the Acre–Haifa highway. Ultimately, Makhoul was given a reduced sentence of nine years in prison as part of a plea bargain in which he confessed to espionage and related charges.
²⁰⁰

Denmark, it turns out, had been central to at least one earlier Hezbollah recruitment gambit. In December 2004, a Danish citizen of Lebanese descent named Khaled Ashuah arrived in Israel on a Turkish Airlines flight. His newly issued Danish passport bore no markings from his trip to Lebanon to visit family the previous summer. While in Lebanon, Ashuah’s brother introduced him to Hezbollah officials who recruited him as an agent and instructed him to travel to Israel to collect intelligence, much like Smyrek, Ayub, and Shuman had done before him. After three weeks of training and preparation, Ashuah returned home to Denmark with $2,000 and clear operational instructions from Hezbollah. Once his new passport arrived, he flew to Israel with plans to travel north, where he would stay with Israeli Arab relatives and identify suitable sites for future Hezbollah attacks. But while riding the train between Nahariya and Haifa, Ashuah apparently filmed security installations in a rather conspicuous manner. An Israel Railways security officer notified authorities, who arrested Ashuah.
²⁰¹

Under questioning, Ashuah admitted to being recruited by Hezbollah and said he had been sent to Israel to collect intelligence on security installations and army bases in the north of the country. He was also told to identify Israeli Arabs to be recruited, although he appears to have had time only to try to recruit a couple of people, including his cousin, Hussein Ashuah. Brashly, Ashuah told police he considered this first visit just a test for more important operations he planned to carry out on behalf of Hezbollah in the future.
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The aggressive and proactive posture of Hezbollah’s Unit 1800 led Israeli intelligence to devote significant resources toward intelligence collection efforts targeting not only Imad Mughniyeh but also key deputies like Unit 1800 commander Haj Halil Hareb. At least once, senior officials considered responding to Hezbollah terrorist activity with targeted assassinations of such leaders, according to a study prepared for the US Air Force on the use of air operations in Israel’s war against Hezbollah.
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Nasrallah, for his part, warned that Hezbollah had its own “target bank” of Israeli military and critical infrastructure sites it could attack within minutes of any Israeli attack.
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Such threats would have to be taken very seriously, given Hezbollah’s success infiltrating its own operatives into Israel and recruiting Palestinians and Israeli Arabs to collect such intelligence for the group.

Qais Obeid’s efforts to recruit Israeli Arabs and to infiltrate operatives into Israel continue as of this writing. In 2005, reports emerged that Obeid flew from Beirut to Egypt, where he held meetings with members of Fatah’s al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades—who at the time were practically operating as terrorist subcontractors for Hezbollah—in El Arish in the northern Sinai.
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In late 2009, Obeid’s name appeared in the press again, this time when he called to comfort the mother of a Fatah operative who had been killed by Israeli authorities after allegedly taking part in the shooting of an Israeli civilian, with promises that Hezbollah would “assist the family in anything she asked for.” By this time not only Israel but the Palestinian Authority too feared that Hezbollah was actively trying to infiltrate Palestinian Authority ranks in order to recruit Fatah members.
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Six months later, their suspicions were confirmed when Palestinian Authority security agencies arrested dozens of Hezbollah recruits in the West Bank. The young men, Palestinian officials reported, were part of an organized Hezbollah recruitment effort led by Qais Obeid to undermine the relative calm Israelis and Palestinians were then experiencing on the ground.
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In the winter of 2011, the IDF decided to renew Lt. Gen. Gabi Ashkenazi’s security detail even though he had retired as chief of staff almost a year prior. Fresh intelligence suggested that Hezbollah was planning attacks on Israeli targets worldwide to avenge Mughniyeh’s assassination. Due to Hezbollah’s previous attempts to target Ashkenazi, and Ashkenazi’s status as IDF chief of staff when Mughniyeh was assassinated, Israel was not taking any chances.
²⁰⁸
A few weeks later, in January 2012, the Israeli military announced again that it was tightening Ashkenazi’s security. Nearing the anniversary of Mughniyeh’s death, this second announcement came just days after Thai police arrested a suspected Hezbollah operative in Bangkok and a week after Bulgarian security officials found a suspicious package on a bus carrying Israeli tourists.
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Beyond Hezbollah’s persistent efforts to recruit Israeli Arabs and its operational focus on infiltrating operatives into Israel, Hezbollah has engaged, as we have seen, in a variety of operational and support activities far away from the Blue Line separating Israel and Lebanon. Among the lesser-known stories of Hezbollah’s global footprint are its activities in Africa.

1.
Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS), “Terrorist Group Profiler: Hamas,” June 2002. See also Stewart Bell, “Hamas May Have Chemical Weapons: CSIS Report Says Terror Group May Be Experimenting,”
National Post
(Canada), December 10, 2003.

2.
Israeli Defense Forces, Military Intelligence, “Iran and Syria as Strategic Support for Palestinian Terrorism,” September 2002. Report based on the interrogations of arrested Palestinian terrorists and captured Palestinian Authority documents.

3.
Douglas Frantz and James Risen, “A Secret Iran-Arafat Connection Is Seen Fueling the Mideast Fire,”
New York Times
, March 24, 2002.

4.
Molly Moore and John Ward Anderson, “Suicide Bombers Change Mideast’s Military Balance,”
Washington Post
, August 17, 2002.

5.
“Iran Expands Its Palestinian Control; Offers al-Khadoumi Five Million Dollars,”
al-Watan
(Kuwait), December 13, 2004.

6.
Israeli intelligence report, “Hezbollah’s International Terrorism and the Penetration of Hezbollah Activists into Israel,” undated, author’s personal files, received August 5, 2003.

7.
Kevin Peraino, “Death of a Hezbollah Leader: Attack Fells a Suspected Terrorist with a List of Enemies,”
Newsweek
, February 12, 2008.

8.
Ranstorp, “Hizbollah’s Command Leadership.”

9.
Douglas Frantz, “The Accountant Is a Terrorist,”
New York Times
, November 10, 1996.

10.
Mikdad: Into the Mind of a Terrorist
, DVD, Director Dan Setton, Direct Cinema Limited, 1998.

11.
Ibid.

12.
Ibid.

13.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

14.
Mikdad
.

15.
For a detailed discussion of terrorism aimed at disrupting the Oslo peace process, see Matthew Levitt,
Negotiating under Fire: Preserving Peace Talks in the Face of Terror Attacks
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2008).

16.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

17.
Mikdad
.

18.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.” By another account, Mikdad joined Hezbollah in 1994 and began working as an accountant in one of Sheikh Fadlallah’s charitable foundations. See Forest,
Making of a Terrorist
, 257.

19.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist”;
Mikdad
.

20.
Forest,
Making of a Terrorist
, 257.

21.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

22.
Ibid.

23.
Ibid.

24.
Israeli intelligence report, “Hizballah’s International Terrorism,” undated, received by the author August 5, 2003.

25.
US Department of Justice, FBI, “International Radical Fundamentalism.”

26.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist”; Israeli Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Jerusalem Police Spokesman, “Details of Lawrence Hotel Bombing Released,” May 16, 1996;
Mikdad
.

27.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

28.
Mikdad
.

29.
Ibid.; Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

30.
Mikdad
.

31.
Ibid.

32.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

33.
Mikdad
.

34.
Ibid.

35.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

36.
Mikdad
.

37.
Ibid.

38.
Ibid.

39.
Frantz, “Accountant Is a Terrorist.”

40.
Mikdad
.

41.
Forest,
Making of a Terrorist
, 258; Hussein Dakroub, “Prisoners Arrive Home After Israel and Lebanon Swap Bodies,” Associated Press, June 26, 1998.

42.
Philippine intelligence report, “TIR on Pandu Yudhawinata,” December 8, 1999, 9; Israeli intelligence report, “Hizballah’s International Terrorism.”

43.
Margot Dudkevitch, “Germany Warned Israel of Smyrek,”
Jerusalem Post
, December 28, 1997; Justin Sparks, “Freed Terrorist Vows He’ll Fulfill Suicide Mission,”
Sunday Times
(London), February 8, 2004.

44.
Author interview, former Israeli judiciary official, Israel, September 12, 2011.

45.
Margot Dudkevitch and Douglas Davis, “German Terror Suspect’s Mother Asks Forgiveness,”
Jerusalem Post
, December 30, 1997; Dudkevitch, “Germany Warned Israel of Smyrek”; Forest,
Making of a Terrorist
, 258; Israeli intelligence report, “Hizballah’s International Terrorism.” By other accounts, Smyrek converted to Islam shortly after completing a third prison term for drug offenses. See Agence France-Presse, “English-Educated German among Prisoners to Go Free in Hezbollah Deal,” January 27, 2004.

46.
German government reports referenced in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Investigations Unit of the Office of the Attorney General,
Office of Criminal Investigations: AMIA Case
, report by Marcelo Martinez Burgos and Alberto Nisman, October 25, 2006, 305.